Centrist Poison

Paul Krugman’s scathing take on what it means to be a centrist:

What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?

A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.

Even if the original Obama plan — around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial fraction of that total given over to ineffective tax cuts — had been enacted, it wouldn’t have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 trillion over the next three years.

Yet the centrists did their best to make the plan weaker and worse.

One of the best features of the original plan was aid to cash-strapped state governments, which would have provided a quick boost to the economy while preserving essential services. But the centrists insisted on a $40 billion cut in that spending.

The original plan also included badly needed spending on school construction; $16 billion of that spending was cut. It included aid to the unemployed, especially help in maintaining health care — cut. Food stamps — cut. All in all, more than $80 billion was cut from the plan, with the great bulk of those cuts falling on precisely the measures that would do the most to reduce the depth and pain of this slump.

On the other hand, the centrists were apparently just fine with one of the worst provisions in the Senate bill, a tax credit for home buyers. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research calls this the “flip your house to your brother” provision: it will cost a lot of money while doing nothing to help the economy.

All in all, the centrists’ insistence on comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted will, if reflected in the final bill, lead to substantially lower employment and substantially more suffering.

Krugman’s anger is shared by many others:

D-Day and Matthew Yglesias note Ben Nelson’s Orwellian response when a reporter asks what Nelson thinks of Paul Krugman’s criticism of the cuts:

Q: Do you agree, or how do you respond to Paul Krugman in the New York Times who said that centrists have done their best to “make the plan weaker and worse?”

NELSON: Well, first of all, they’re not cuts. Let’s just get that up front. These are adjustments downward from numbers that were offered by the House in their version and by the Senate in its version.

Ross Douthat thinks that the liberals have a point:

The liberals are angry, and not without reason. You can imagine a world in which “centrist” Senators used their awesome deal-making powers to forge compromises that incorporate ideas from the left and right alike. A world in which moderate “gangs,” in David Brooks’ formulation, actually put meat on the bones of Barack Obama’s promise to end politics as usual. A world in which Susan Collins, Ben Nelson, Arlen Specter and Joe Lieberman emerged as ardent champions of, say, a stimulus approach divided evenly between billions in Keynesian spending and billions for the sort of payroll tax proposal that people like Larry Lindsey and Greg Mankiw have been championing – or some similarly wonky, high-concept policy compromise. A world of bipartisanship and postpartisanship and everything in between.

But that’s not the world we live in. In this world, centrist Senators exist to take politics as usual – whether it’s tax cuts in Republican eras, or spending splurges in Democratic ones – and make it ever so slightly more fiscally responsible. So if the GOP wants, say, $500 billion in tax cuts, the country clearly needs $400 billion in tax cuts – but not a penny more! And if the Democrats want $900 billion in stimulus, then the best possible policy outcome must be … $800 billion in stimulus! To read this Arlen Specter op-ed, justifying both the stimulus package and the cuts the “gang of moderates” have attempted to impose, is to encounter a mind incapable of thinking about policy in any terms save these: Take what the party in power wants, subtract as much money as you can without infuriating them, vote yes, and declare victory.

Now fiscal responsibility is generally a good thing, and so a centrism mindlessly focused on tweaking legislation away from deficit spending has its uses. But what Nelson, Collins, Specter and Co. have done isn’t a new kind of politics. It’s the definition of politics as usual. And in this particular case, there’s a reasonable argument that it’s actively pernicious – that if you can’t shrink the stimulus package much more substantially than the centrists have done, you shouldn’t shrink it at all. There’s a case to be made for a stimulus that’s radically different than the one we have now; there’s a case to be made for a stimulus that’s like the one we have now, but a great deal smaller and more targeted; and there’s a case to be made for a stimulus that’s absolutely gargantuan. But thanks to the centrists, we’re getting the cheapskate version of the gargantuan version: They’ve done absolutely nothing to widen the terms of debate about what should go into the bill, and they’ve shaved off just enough money to reduce its effectiveness if Paul Krugman is right – but not nearly enough to make it fiscally prudent if the stimulus skeptics are right. 

Ezra Klein points to “a pithier take on ‘centrism.’ “

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